"Why do we consider banks to be like holy churches?" is the rhetorical question that Iceland's President Olafur Ragnar Grimson asks (and answers) in this truly epic three minutes of truthiness from the farce that is the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Icelandic President explains why his nation is growing strongly, why unemployment is negligible, and how they moved from the world's poster-child for banking crisis 5 years ago to a thriving nation once again. Simply put, he says, "we didn't follow the prevailing orthodoxies of the last 30 years in the Western world."
Daniel Hannan is a British journalist, author and politician who is a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), representing South East England for the Conservative Party. He is also the Secretary-General of the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (AECR). Besides politics, Hannan is a journalist, having written leaders and currently authoring a blog for The Daily Telegraph and several books on both the EU and localism.
The past and present bailouts of each and every bank (and 'important' industry) will, one day, be seen as a generational offense is how MEP Daniel Hannan begins this thoroughly British demolition of the three critical myths surrounding the crisis, that despite market optics, we are still living through. From the idea that capitalism has failed (it has not in his view, it has been ravaged by political pandering), to the crisis being caused by lack of regulation, and that greed is the single-driver of the mess that we remain in; Hannan suggests in a brief but extremely eloquent debate that there is a world of difference between being pro business and pro market as he destroys any semblance of credibility that the political (and elite) class has echoing a young Ron Paul in his thoroughly libertarian free-market sensibilities.
Max Keiser is an American broadcaster and film-maker. He hosts Keiser Report, a financial program broadcast on RT. Keiser anchors On the Edge, a program of news and analysis hosted by Press TV. He hosted the New Year's Eve special The Keiser's Business Guide to 2010 for BBC Radio 5 Live. Keiser presented a season of The Oracle with Max Keiser on BBC World News. He produced and appeared in the TV series People & Power on the Al-Jazeera English network. He presents a weekly show about finance and markets on London's Resonance FM, and writes for The Huffington Post.